Technology keeps solving the problems technology creates, tightening our dependence on machinery whose cumulative costs keep growing and from which there is no longer any clean exit.
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The Herd
This is the triumphal stagnancy of technological overreach: extraordinary technical acceleration coupled to an increasingly repetitive behavioural repertoire.
When religious language does more work for political identity than religious ethics do for moral conduct, God becomes useful in ways we should all probably question.
Heaven is not somewhere beyond the world; if it can be said to exist at all, it must be found within the inexhaustibly complex structure already here.
Conflict builds technology, technology reorganises conflict, and somewhere inside the loop every new problem becomes someone’s next investment opportunity.
Peace is not merely difficult. We have built institutions, identities, economies and languages whose coherence depends upon the persistence of conflict.
Counter-disinformation has a structural problem: engaging a message often helps keep it alive. While this is generally unsurprising dynamical behaviour, it remains widely misunderstood.
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Belief as Harmonic Structure
Belief is harmonic structure: the recurrent pattern of timing, relation and probability through which language, meaning and experience take form.
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What Does Education Do?
Education stabilises knowledge long enough to transmit it, even as the machinery through which knowledge is produced and interpreted accelerates the movement of the epistemic attractor itself.
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Civilisation: Diary of a Madman
A civilisation builds systems to solve its problems, then discovers that the systems have become the problems, while its dependence upon them has made their continuity deeply problematic.
Institutions study the world remarkably well. The harder problem is that the world they are studying is also inside the building, and there is no position outside the system from which that entanglement simply disappears.
The current US President destabilised one of the most tightly coupled junctions on Earth, then seemed surprised when the consequences spread. The deeper problem is that political, ideological and socioeconomic systems often reproduce themselves through the disorder they create.
Daedelus Kite 